Yesterday, I read this strip in my 2010 Dilbert Desk Calendar.


(original page, in case the image tags don't work: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-07-16/)

Yeah, okay - Dilbert's not to everyone's taste.

Anyway... Today I got my weekly email from New Scientist, linking me to this article:

Brain damage skews our moral compass

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IS IT more morally acceptable to kill someone accidentally, or intend to kill them but fail? Most people would go for the first option - unless their brains are impaired in regions key to feeling emotion or divining the intentions of others.

This discovery is helping to unravel how we make moral judgements and has implications for people's fitness to serve as jurors or judges.

To probe emotion's role in moral decision-making, Liane Young and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned to nine people whose emotional responses were impaired due to damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Blah blah blah...

Creepy, huh?

Also the other day, the attached posts popped up on facebook one right after the other. I've blurred out identities for privacy's sake.